Are your perfectly crafted lead generation campaigns underperforming? Are you fed up and feel like giving up on one or more or all your lead generation strategies? Are you on a low budget with high marketing goals and ambitions?

You probably have already mastered every popular technique of getting customers used by sales teams across the B2B sector but haven’t built a winning system yet.

In order to do it you should thoroughly test and tweak the heck out of your strategies until they finally start to work at their full potential. Learn to read between the lines of your failure and redesign it into success.

Limited budget becomes less of an issue because luckily there’s a growing plethora of solutions both effective and affordable.

This post is going to give you a number of small and big suggestions on increasing quality leads.

1. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Search Ads

How do you know the exact keywords your ideal client types in the search when looking for your product or service? What kind of ad copy would impress them most? If you just follow the logic and invest in advertising relying on assumptions, you will drain your budget in no time.

It’s a shot in the dark.

You need a proof that all components of your ad campaign can actually deliver practical results.

Most companies learn their audiences the hard way through their own trial and error. They waste tons of money on experiments playing with their ads until they collect enough data to back up their logical guesswork and prove it to themselves.

However, instead you can steal this data from your competitors who sell very similar products and services. If there’s an ad they keep running for weeks or months, doesn’t it mean they’re reaping good profits from it?

You can model this ad and bid on the same keywords to replicate their triumph. Note that modeling is not copying and pasting, it’s all about imitating the ideas.

Wonder how to find your closest competitors and their top performing ads to model? You can do it at scale with competitive intelligence tools such as:

2. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Native Ads

Discover and research top performing native ad campaigns in your industry to learn what works for your strongest competitors and create winning campaigns for your business based on key ingredients of their success.

There are competitive intelligence tools built specifically for native ads:

Recommended tools:

4. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Landing Pages

By clicking on your competitor’s winning ad you will see their winning landing page and this place is a golden mine for your business. It’s already proven to convert as they keep paying to drive traffic to it so it can teach you a lot about your audience.

Model all its elements and create a similar one, come up with your own version of their conversion monster.

If there’s a video on their page – make the same type of video, if there’s a survey – build the same type of survey, if there’s an arrow pointing to the button – put the same type of arrow too, etc.

Arrange everything in the same order as they did. If, for example, they added the call to action above their video – so should you. But keep in mind, you’re not plagiarizing anyone, be careful, don’t cross the line trying to achieve resemblance.

Recommended tools:

5. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Lead Magnet

Sign up to whatever is offered on your competitor’s landing page – a free trial, a PDF report, a video series, etc. This is a winning lead magnet. Analyze and emulate it for your business.

6. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Email Follow-Up

As a fake lead on their email list, your goal is to understand why their email copies convert and craft your own follow up with the same conversion triggers.

7. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Entire Sales Funnel

If their funnel weren’t profitable, would they keep running that ad? Hell, no.

Although you can model just one or few components of their sales funnel to combine with yours for experimenting, the only surefire way to replicate their results is modelling it entirely. Don’t skip anything it includes.

8. Model Your Closest Competitor’s Content Marketing

Discover top traffic sources of your most successful competitors and distribute your content to these places offering more value to the reader. Find out what are the most popular topics and blog posts on your closest competitors’ websites to produce content that’s in high demand in your niche.

Reveal your competitors’ most profitable search terms to outrank them and boost your SEO. Get to know which social platforms work best for them and unveil which blog posts pull the most social traffic in your industry.

Recommended tools:

9. Add Content Upgrades to Your Blog Posts

Content upgrades serve as contextual lead magnets offered within your piece of content to provide your readers with extra value in exchange for their contact info.

Sky is the limit to your content upgrade ideas, pick any, from PDF checklists and workshops to webinars and consulting sessions, from free trials to forever free products, etc. It’s all cool as long as your lead magnet is highly useful and relevant to either entire blog post or just one sentence that is not off topic of your article.

One of the best ways to incorporate content upgrades in your blog posts is by following the example of Sumo.com:

Recommended tools:

Recommended resources:

10. Add Content Upgrades to Your Videos

Convert your website video views into leads. Offer content upgrades by adding a subscription form in the middle or at the end of your videos. Possible scenarios:

When watching your video people see a pop-up form below the YouTube or Vimeo player at a certain time that you specify. This allows you to offer relevant content upgrades at the right time to the viewer.

Break your video into 2 parts – 2 value packs of content. When the first part is over, the video will stop playing and the viewers will see a form pop up inside your video player. They have to opt-in to watch the second part.

Offer any relevant value showing a sign-up form at the end of the video.

Recommended tools:

11. Add Content Upgrades to Your Slideshow Presentations

Convert your slideshow views into leads. Find a way to embed a lead form into a slide or make an on-click popup work from within your presentation on your website. I haven’t figured it out yet and just link slides to relevant landing pages.

12. Add Content Upgrades to Your Lead Magnets

You might wanna add more value to your lead magnets. For example, offer a free one on one consultation session or free trial of your product inside your free PDF report or case study in order to move your lead closer to the sale.

Other use cases:

Let the content upgrades within your lead magnet serve as unannounced/unexpected bonuses. For example, link your opt-in PDF report to your other relevant reports. No requirements, just download links.

If you decide to build an email list B from your email list A for some reason, insert opt-in forms for the list B inside your PDF report or just link to your landing page for that list.

Ask for social shares in exchange for the access to your content upgrades.

13. Content Upgrades for Social Shares

Ideas 9-3 can be used to collect social shares instead of opt-in leads. Growing social shares is a great lead generation strategy as well. You’re getting people to bring you social traffic that you’ll convert into leads.

Recommended services:

14. Free 1 on 1 Consultations

You leave a lot of money on the table hoping that your potential client would figure out on their own whether your product or service can solve their problem or not by learning about it from your sales page, blog posts and lead magnets or even by going as far as taking its free trial or buying it.

As an expert in your field you would help them make the right decision quickly if you had a conversation with them over the phone or Skype saving them from a time consuming information overload and a headache of wondering and guessing.

Free consultations is a great way to generate high ticket leads, develop relationships with them and deliver your sales pitch as the ultimate solution.

However, it’s gonna be a huge time waster in your business if you don’t:

Specify the exact topic or issue you will have a talk about

Set a time limit for your consulting session ( 20 mins to 1 hour)

Pre-qualify your lead for your consulting session by having them fill out a webform to apply for it and getting

Announce a free consultation offer on your website globally or make it a content upgrade for your relevant blog posts, PDF lead magnets, videos, slideshows or sliders. Consider also adding it to your social media profiles and pages.

Consult your way to the close.

15. 1 on 1 Coaching

Lead nurturing is all about educating your potential clients to a sales-ready state. However, most companies simply provide their leads with relevant and timely info relying on their self-education.

Why do people pay tons of money to go to college or university or hire a coach while there are free blogs, ebooks, video courses, infographics, webinars online on any topic imaginable at their fingertips? They need a mentor.

You can start a one on one coaching program as a free or low end service that generates interest and demand in your high end one. Offer a free 30 minute Skype coaching session to collect leads, enroll paid students and as soon as they complete your program, closing high end sales will be an absolute breeze.

Be strict about who to coach, pre-qualify your leads for your free sessions properly.

Coach your way to the close.

16. Group Coaching

Coaching a group of students at once rather than just one person is still an amazing low end or free offer to compliment your high end service. But your students will compete for your attention and you will have to switch it from one to another all the time which is frustrating and discouraging for both you and them.

For group coaching online you can use Skype or alternative tools for video conference calls but make sure to allow all the people on the call to see and talk to each other including yourself. Treat your leads seriously unlike webinar hosts who mute all their attendees and you type your questions in the box to get no response.

Group coach your way to the close.

17. Create an Info Product

Your own free or paid info product such as an ebook or video course can serve you as a lucrative marketing tool that attracts, converts, nurtures, educates, persuades and even closes sales leads for your business on autopilot enhancing your reputation, credibility and visibility in your industry.

Writing an ebook also allows you to tap into new lead generation channels – ebook stores like Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks. As to video courses, you can upload them to online learning platforms like Skillshare and Lynda where your targeted audience might be present as well.

18. Co-Create an Info Product

Start a collaborative project creating an info product together with thought leaders in your industry to get access to their massive audiences relevant to your business. This is a highly rewarding cross promotion strategy similar to expert roundup blog posts but in form of an ebook or video course.

You might wanna keep it simple. Pick up a great topic. Interview tens to hundreds of influencers and turn this content into a free ebook. Put it on your website or Amazon and get them to share it to their following online. On top of that you can distribute it across multiple ebook stores online.

You can also go really far and make a video course getting each influencer to create one course module or just a short but value-packed video for it. When your training program is ready, all of you will launch it simultaneously to your audiences and share the sales revenue if it’s not free.

Recommended tools:

19. Contribute a Course Module

You can create a mini course that will complement all courses within a specific topic of your niche. For example, you know an extremely powerful technique to make a killing with Facebook ads. It may serve as a cool additional module to any Facebook training program available on the web.

So if people who learn Facebook advertising is the right audience for your business, create a short comprehensive step-by-step video guide teaching your technique and reach out to Facebook course creators offering them to add value to their course by including your video(s) inside their membership area as an extra module in return for a link back to your company website.

Recommended tools:

23. Swap Emails with Email List Owners in Your Industry

Good old school method. Reach out to email list owners with the same list size as yours, those who you know and trust. Ask them to send your email to their subscribers in return for you doing the same for them. Make sure their audience match your business and avoid direct competitors.

Recommended tools:

24. Start an Affiliate Program

If you had an army of successful affiliates promoting your product or service, you would receive leads and sales on complete autopilot without having to pay anything upfront, just a certain commission per sale after the sale is made. They do all the marketing for you and you just sit back and relax.

However, if you launch your affiliate program on your website and simply wait for good affiliates to join it, they won’t. You have to promote it and recruit yourself an army of the right affiliates who are able to bring you sales.

Find online advertising experts who do affiliate marketing to pitch your affiliate program. You can also pitch it to popular bloggers in your industry. They’re not necessarily good at advertising but they’ve got large audiences that you can help them convert for your business.

Recommended tools:

Grow Sumo (start an affiliate program that will also be available to their community of influential affiliates for consideration)

25. Hire a Commission Based Salesperson

There are salespeople who don’t mind to work for a commission per sale only, especially those at the beginning of their sales career, young experts. You can connect with them through Facebook and Linkedin groups, by running Facebook and Linkedin ads, posting your job to job boards and industry forums, submitting your project to freelancing platforms or hiring a recruiting company that will find them for your company.

Many people are eager to even work a temporary job for free in exchange for training, experience and testimonials to add to their portfolios. You might consider this option too.

Also, you can also hire someone from developing countries like Ukraine or Philippines to at least partially outsource the most tedious tasks at a very low cost. If you don’t want a salesperson, you should still consider getting a virtual assistant to help you with lead generation.

26. Guest Blogging

This is a great way to establish good digital relationships with the blog owner and get on the radar of their network of influential connections. So other influencers will be interested in connecting with you too.

Publishing a guest post on a popular blog in your industry allows you to put your business in front of its large relevant audience. By accepting your guest post, the blog owner puts the seal of approval on your business and their readers start to trust you too. You will receive endorsed traffic, not cold visitors from ads.

Of course you will also get backlinks for your SEO and increase traffic from search.

However, if you’re still a no name online, it’s hard to get your guest post accepted. It’s possible if your article rocks and you’re able to pitch it like god but before you go, you should start and nurture relationships with the blog owners by commenting on their posts and interacting with them in social media.

Link your guest post or/and your about-the-author box to your landing page so that you generate leads from guest posting to its full potential.

Recommended services:

27. Accept Guest Posts

If you have a pretty popular blog, invite influencers to publish guest post on it as this is a great way to develop relationships with them, supply your audience with additional value and reach their huge audiences because they will hit the share button on their own posts for sure.

28. Get Featured on an Influencer’s Podcast

There are probably at least a few popular podcasts in your industry. These are your splendid opportunities to get in front of large audience as a guest on their show. Even if your company hasn’t yet established trust and credibility online, you can still be invited by influential podcasters for an interview in their upcoming episodes.

For this you need to take time to develop strong digital relationships with them and pitch a fantastic content idea that you wanna cover during their show. If they already know you and believe in your ability to deliver value, you’ll be given a chance to talk to their listeners.

Recommended tools:

Recommended resources:

29. Invite Influencers to Your Podcast

Interviewing influencers on your podcast is one of the best ways to supercharge your strategic relationships with them and drive leads as they share your episode to their massive following online. Even if you’re not yet their peer and your audience is a lot smaller, it’s still not a reason to give up on this idea. Everything depends on how well they know and trust you to spend their precious time on your show.

Start podcasting from inviting small influencers moving on to the bigger and bigger ones as you grow your podcast into a powerful lead generation machine.

Recommended tools:

31. Invite an Influencer to Your Webinar

This is a fantastic cross promotion strategy as you’re going to collect webinar registrations from both audiences, yours and theirs.

However, if your audience is small, you’re unlikely to get very influential guests with huge audiences. But there are small, less known influencers with similar sized audiences to target. They would gladly accept your invitation and be your guests.

You can also interview multiple guests during your webinar session and drive leads from the combination of their small relevant audiences.

32. Host a Giveaway on a Popular Blog

Reach out to influential bloggers in your industry pitching your product or service giveaway idea. Offer their audience:

X months of your high end/low end product/service for free

Limited version of your high end/low product/service forever free

Free one on one consulting/coaching calls with you

Free exclusive coaching webinars/group coaching sessions

Free audits of their SEO/ad campaigns/design/whatever your company does

Free lifetime access to your mastermind Facebook/Linkedin group

Free access to video courses that you sell elsewhere

Other kinds of massive value

Don’t give away something that is:

Irrelevant to the influencer’s audience

Not massive value

Cheap ($7 ebook, $25 WordPress plugin, $47 Software program – pfff)

Already available on your website or elsewhere for free or at a low price

Don’t give away the same thing on multiple blogs, including yours, simultaneously.

There are 2 ways for their audience to get your freebie:

Make it a contest. People have to sign up to the blog owner’s email list, follow their Facebook page, share the giveaway post in social media and probably do a lot more of this kind of garbage work just to increase their chances to win your prize.

They just sign up to the influencer’s email list and receive a special code or link to register a free account of your Saas tool, schedule a free one-on-one consultation, download a software program, etc.

Both of you will benefit from the giveaway collecting email addresses. But you should consider rewarding the influencer with a referral commission per sale or even per lead on top of that mutual profit.

Recommended tools:

33. Host a Giveaway Roundup

Partner up with companies that would like to give away their products or services if they have large similar audiences that fit your business and if your company is not in direct competition with them. Put your giveaway products or services together in a post that you will publish on your own or one of their popular blogs. When it’s live, all of you will share it with your audiences and enjoy the traffic avalanche.

Recommended tools:

34. Start an Expert Roundup Blog Post

Perform an influencer outreach approaching them with a question that’s going to be the topic of your expert roundup blog post. Collect their answers or make short interviews and put them together into a lengthy article. Get all the respondents or interviewees to share your content, in creation of which they took part. Enjoy the traffic and leads flowing in.

Recommended tools:

35. Create an Expert Roundup Infographic/Gifographic

Reach out to influencers with a question, put their answers together into an infographic or gifographic and get all of them to share it in social media, some of them might also wanna embed it on their blogs.

Create embeddable content assets for your business.

Recommended resources:

36. Create an Expert Roundup Slideshow

Reach out to influencers with a question, put their answers together into a slideshow presentation, upload it to Slideshare and get all of them to share it in social media, some of them might also wanna embed it on their blogs.

Create embeddable content assets for your business.

37. Collect Blog Post Followers

This is a little known but excellent list building strategy to capture massive opt-in leads from your blog. Here’s how it works. You write a valuable blog post and get your readers to sign up for an even more valuable upcoming extra piece of content you’re going to add to it soon.

For example, you promise your readers to conduct a research that will complement your article and allow them to follow your blog post to be notified of this update. Insert a follow button at the top and bottom of your blog post. Here’s a bare-bones example below:

GIF

This is a demo of the Follow My Blog Post WordPress Plugin that illustrates the idea of collecting blog post followers. Although I know a person who uses this product without any issues, it has 3.7 stars based on 23 reviews on Codecanyon marketplace, so I can’t recommend it as some buyers aren’t very happy with it. Try it at your own risk if you will.

Here’s an alternative way to set things up:

Create a follow button with a WordPress plugin for making buttons

Create an on-click pop-up form with a WordPress plugin for making pop-up forms

In your email marketing service, like Mailchimp, create a new email list for the blog post you want your blog readers to follow.

Your research may be as simple as surveying your own audience or interviewing a specific group of people to collect data that backs up a certain statement, proves something right or wrong, busts myths, helps understand important factors, etc.

Recommended services:

40. Boost Your Top Lead Capturing Blog Posts

If you have an established blog that works well for lead generation, look for your blog posts that have been converting your readers into leads at the highest rate for an extended period of time. You should keep promoting them until your other posts start outperforming them.

Note which traffic source has been sending you the highest converting website visitors to one of these posts.

If it’s your Facebook page, share this blog post there once again and boost it to similar audiences starting with a tiny budget. Getting good results, increase your ad spend. In case your campaign fails, split test a few more ads with little money.

If it’s Twitter – boost this blog post the similar way with Twitter ads.

If it’s Pinterest – use Pinterest ads.

If it’s Linkedin – use Linkedin ads.

Etc.

Many bloggers mistakenly boost their most popular posts, not the most converting ones and lose money. For example, a post that received 500 views and generated 50 leads is more important for your business than a post that hit 5k views and captured 100 leads. Boosting the last one without re-optimizing it for conversions is not a good way to build your list.

43. Re-Publish Your Content

There are large publications that accept and re-publish already published content such as Elite Daily. Do the research and unearth a bunch of similar sites for your niche and try to pitch them your article for republishing.

There are also places where you can re-publish your content yourself but you won’t get traffic if you haven’t established your presence on these platforms already:

Medium

Linkedin Pulse

Facebook Instant Articles

Etc…

Re-publishing is not about just copying & pasting your content. Rewrite it properly.

Only use this strategy if you’re good at SEO yourself or have an SEO expert assist you because there are still debates about whether re-publishing hurts your rankings.

Recommended tools:

Recommended services:

44. Cite Influencers

Collect valuable information from influential thought leaders in your industry. Make short abstracts and citations out of their:

Blog posts

Social media posts

Forum posts

Comments on other blogs

Videos

Audio podcasts

Slideshows

Offline event speeches

Add your own thoughtful commentaries to their pieces of content, put it all together into a blog post, link back to them and let them know you’ve done so. It’s a great way to start relationships with influencers and get social shares.

If you don’t link your blog posts to other sites to not send your traffic away from your business and think that content curation may hurt it, then you might wanna do it on your secondary blog that you can start on a platform like Medium for example.

45. Reach Out to Influencers for Social Shares

46. Ask Your Content Sharers for More Social Shares

People who previously shared your content are likely to share your new piece of content too especially if it’s relevant to the previous one. For example, your previous blog post was the chapter 1 of your case study. Now you’re publishing the chapter 2. Reach out to those who shared the first one and let them know that the chapter 2 is live and ask them to share it as well. They’re very likely to be inclined to do so.

Recommended tools:

47. Turn Your Lead Magnet into a Series

What usually happens soon after people sign up to your email list and check out your lead magnet? They forget about your company.

Whether they’ve found value in it or not, they’ve heard what you had to say and seen what you had to show. The game is over. There’s no big reason for them to want to hear from you again.

The only thing they will expect to come next is an annoying sequence of pushy sales emails or/and phone calls from your company to force them into buying what was mentioned and pre-sold inside your lead magnet.

Load it to your autoresponder and schedule to send out 1 chapter a day or every 2 days to your new email subscribers, whatever frequency makes more sense to you.

48. Create Sequential Blog Posts

High quality sequential blog posts can serve your business both as lead magnets to build your list and lead nurturing campaigns for your existing email subscribers. If you manage to capture your website visitors with value in one or more already published posts from your blog post series, they will sign up to wait for the upcoming content.

Follow the example of sequential lead magnets. Break your detailed case study into 2-10 parts and turn them into articles that you will schedule to post one per week or month.

Recommended tools:

52. Feature Your Prospects in Your Blog Post

This is a powerful strategy that allows you to hit two birds with one stone:

Create excellent content for your industry

Turn featured prospects into sales fast, often without any selling

Reach out to your prospects via email or social media asking a question. Their answers are supposed to reveal the exact pain points your product or service is solving. Offer them to feature their interviews or just short answers on your blog providing backlinks to their websites. It’s got to bribe them and seal the deal.

Their ego will force them to agree.

Collect their answers and interviews which reveal certain sets of issues, challenges, frustrations they are currently experiencing in their business.

Add your own commentary to every individual answer/interview explaining how your product or service can help them in a non-salesy way and link to its free trial.

Invite them to read and share your post in social media when it’s live.

Many of them will wanna take your offer.

Your other blog readers will enjoy it and take action too.

Recommended tools:

53. Make a Client Roundup Post

Reach out to your existing and past clients to interview them about a specific issue that your product or service is successfully solving or have already solved. Your interview may be as simple as a few questions asked and answered via email. As a result you need to get a very brief but comprehensive case study from each of them. Offer your client some sort of reward for taking time and return their favor.

Collect all their short success stories and compile them into a lengthy blog post structured the same way as well-known expert roundups. Title it like, for example:

How We Helped 111 Life Coaches to at Least Double Their Leads in 2 Months

If you don’t have many clients, don’t wanna do the outreach or they ignore your interview requests, then you can follow another strategy. Offer some value for free in exchange for a success story/testimonial. For instance, they sign up for a 14 day free trial of your Saas tool. When the trial expires, offer them to extend it to, lets say, 60 days if they share with you their success story of using the tool.

This kind of post will serve your company as a reputation booster and amazing client magnet.

People tend to keep track of their online reputation, especially personal brands. It’s crucial for business owners. So you can leverage the power of ‘ego-surfing’. Start a personalized ad campaign bidding on your prospects’ full names in Google Adwords (exact match). For example:

Link your ad to a personalized landing page with a personalized video message recorded specifically for this prospect where you’re offering your deal addressing them by name.

55. Use Email Signatures

Engaging in email correspondence with your potential customers you can convert them faster by adding an email signature with a well-thought call to action linking to your lead magnet or sales page and get leads or sales sometimes even without talking about your business at all.

For example, they simply emailed you a question concerning your latest blog post or something and you simply emailed them back with your short answer. Then boom, they saw your signature, clicked on it, signed up for your free report or upcoming webinar, bought your product or service. Magical effect without magic.

56. SMS Lead Generation

Provide your prospects with an option to text your business. It’s way easier and faster than filling out a web form. Almost 99% of text messages get opened within a few minutes as people take their mobile phones everywhere with them and you can reach your leads anytime even if they currently have no access to the internet.

All these things pester your prospects out of doing any business with you.

58. Re-Target Your Website Visitors

A person who visited a certain page, clicked on a certain button on your website has demonstrated interest in something you were offering there. Give them another chance to convert by re-targeting them with a related offer.

59. Re-Target Traffic That You Send to Other Sites

As you share other people’s content on your website and social media, you’re sending your traffic away and just lose your prospects.

However, you might want to attach a message to every link that you share.

Tools like Snip.ly allow you to add a gorgeous bar or pop-up with a call to action to web pages that you’re linking to:

You can go even further with this and set up re-marketing campaigns targeting people who visited your Snip.ly links before:

Recommended tools:

60. Use Social Sign-Up Buttons on Your Blog

Make it easier for your website visitors to get hold of your lead magnet. Just one click on their favorite social site button and done, if they’re logged in to it. Asking for an email address is lame and people think twice before giving it to a business. Oftentimes they enter one that they almost never use.

With social login option they feel a bit more relaxed about joining your email list and you’re going to get their email address that is more likely to be actively used.

Recommended tools:

Smash (WordPress plugin)

61. Convert Your Blog Commenters into Leads

Don’t lose contact with your blog readers who interact with your content taking time to write a comment. Let them automatically subscribe to your newsletter when they hit the button to submit their commentary. Keep the box ticked by default:

Alternatively, instead of “sign me up for the newsletter” you can offer a freebie – “sign me up for YouTube advertising email course” for example.

Recommended tools:

62. List Your B2B Startup in Startup Directories

Get access to extra sources of high quality recurring traffic and leads just by listing your B2B startup in multiple startup directories. However, doing a research to find out what are the best ones and performing manual submission is insanely time consuming and ridiculous. You can have it done for you and skip the nightmare.

Recommended services:

Startup Lister (have your company manually submitted to their curated list of the best B2B startup directories)

63. Reach Out to Reporters and Get Media Coverage

Get your company into the news. Reach out to reporters and pitch your case study.

Recommended services:

64. Create and Distribute a Press Release

Announce your product or service across hundreds to thousands of relevant social media outlets.

65. Value Your Brand Advocates

There must be at least a few people who shared your blog posts, linked to your content and mentioned you, your employee, your company name, your product or service in a positive light on their websites, social media, forums or other places.

Don’t ignore them or you will lose their future support. Reach out and thank your brand advocates, even if they are small guys with little to no audience. Return the favor, share their posts that mention your business to your audience.

Invest your time in developing relationships with them. Spend more of it on influencers but don’t disregard the regular people completely, they are of value too.

66. Ask Your Existing Customers for Referrals

Encourage your happy customers to refer clients to your business by spreading the word about their success with your company in their networks of connections. Reward them with a discount and/or extra product/service they might want to get.

67. Create a Facebook Group

Your own online community may serve your business as an effective lead nurturing tool for your existing audience. This is a place where they can interact with your brand and each other getting help along the way to the buying decision and beyond.

People exchange their experience with your company. Some of your customers may boast about their great results and encourage others to make a purchase ASAP. Some of them may infect the rest of the group with doubts and scepticism about your products or services making them think twice.

You or your group manager must be there to fix this immediately.

You can also leverage your group as a fantastic lead generation tool.

For that, focus your group on a specific subtopic of your industry rather than your brand. Let it be a niche forum where your prospects would hang out at ease without feeling the salesy breath of your company.

Talking to prospects anywhere online it seems fine to invite them to join your cool engaged community while inviting them to opt-in to your email list is outright spam.

Moving people from social media to a high quality group may be a breeze in comparison with getting them on an email list. Test your own Facebook group as a part of your sales funnel.

Invite influencers who know you to join your group.

They will help you grow the group on steroids in 2 ways:

By sharing posts from the group to their huge fan base in your industry

By being social proof that your community is worth it. You can invite your prospects proudly saying, for example: “Tor Refsland is here, how about you? Join us too!”.

Recommended services:

69. Be Active on Industry Forums

Become an active member of top industry forums where you can engage prospects and influencers just like in social media groups. There are two ways to generate leads from forums that make sense to me:

Study and model the most popular and everlasting threads

Use the same framework as for social media groups:

Join a relevant discussion or start your own thread

Post helpful replies

Engage your prospects

Encourage them to send you a dm via the forum for more help

When you get a dm, start a private conversation on the forum

Provide the promised value and pre-qualify your lead

Offer a free consultation/free website audit/free trial/etc

Move your current or next conversation to email, phone or Skype

Deliver the consultation pitching your product/service at the end

Close a sale

70. Try Forum Ads

Spotted your competitor’s ad having been live on an industry forum for an extended period of time? Model it and put a similar one of your own in the same community.

Even if your direct competitors aren’t running ads on your industry forum but you’re getting good quality leads from it, try to advertise there starting with small money.

71. Try Quora Ads

Quora is the best quality Q&A site in the world. If you’re active on this platform and can confirm that its traffic from your answers convert well for your business, then you might wanna try Quora ads. Otherwise, you’re likely to blow your budget. Start low. If your competitors are advertising there – model their ads.

72. Try Reddit Ads

If there are any good subreddits actively used by your targeted audience and you can confirm that their traffic converts well for your business, you might like to try Reddit ads starting low.

73. Use Lead Generation Forms in Social Media

Capture leads right where they are without getting them to leave social networks visiting your website. People are reluctant to distract themselves from their social media activities by jumping over to a different place. Integrate your sales funnel with social platforms.

Recommended services:

Good Audience (helps you create profitable social media lead generation campaigns)

74. Do Social Listening & Prospecting

Monitor social media for prospects’ conversations that you can join and offer help. Also search and discover new prospects to connect with based on such criteria as keywords in their profile bio, their location, who they follow or who follows them, etc.

75. Get Introduced to Your New Leads

If you’re using Linkedin for lead generation, you’re probably familiar with this method when you reach out to your existing connections asking them to introduce you to one of their connections.

Here’s a step-by-step video guide by Jason Sanders, Linkedin marketing coach, showing you how to request an introduction to a second level connection:

There’s no reason why this framework should stick to this platform only. You’re likely to have numerous connections outside of Linkedin. Find out who your non-Linkedin contacts have in their networks of connections and if you discover an ideal prospect – request an introduction to them and get introduced the similar way.

76. Start a YouTube Channel

Don’t ignore the largest search engine for videos in the world and leverage the power of video marketing for lead generation. Upload:

Video demos of your product or service

Webinar recordings

Video guides

Re-purposed articles

Influencer interviews

Rank your videos by:

Embedding them on your website

Embedding them within your guest posts

Sharing them in social media

Sharing them on industry forums

77. Participate in Twitter Chats

Join relevant Twitter chats in your industry held by your direct/indirect competitors. These are basically hashtags actively used in tweets at a certain period of time. It’s usually happening during an online/offline event.

A Twitter chat can also be an event by itself.

Take this opportunity, join relevant conversations and network with your prospects.

Recommended services:

79. Turn Your Homepage into a Landing Page

Home pages usually receive the most traffic. Instead of making it a blog page displaying your latest posts or sales page trying to get sales right off the bat consider showing your best opt-in page because list building is more important for your business than anything else.

80. Turn Your 404 Page into a Landing Page

Don’t let your 404 page be a dead place of your website. When people land on it somehow, don’t let them leave empty-handed. Make it an opt-in page and offer them value.

81. Add a Notification Bar to Your Site

Notification bars are almost non-intrusive and non-annoying for most website visitors unlike the infamous pop-ups. A gorgeously designed notification bar with an opt-in form and magnetic call to action can convert traffic into leads at nearly the same rate if not better. If you still haven’t tested one on your website, you should definitely give it a shot now.

Recommended tools:

WP Notification Bars (WordPress plugin)

82. Add Colorful Flyouts to Your Site

Attract attention of your website visitors by displaying a colorful flyout with a call to action at the top, bottom, left or right side of the screen:

GIF

This is a demo of the BNE Flyouts WordPress plugin that allows to create custom stylish responsive buttons and off-canvas content layouts revealed on click.

You can make your flyouts open any type of form you wanna capture leads with:

An opt-in form

A webinar registration form

A quote request form

A callback request form

A survey

Etc…

Recommended tools:

83. Add a Quote Request Form to Your Site

Allow your website visitors to submit a quote. Receive business inquiries. Let them initiate a hopefully productive and constructive conversation with your business that you or your team will turn into a sale.

Recommended tools:

84. Add a Click to Call Button to Your Website

Just displaying your phone number prominently on your website is not enough if you’re serious about collecting phone call leads. In order to squeeze the most calls out of your website place a sticky colorful click to call button at the bottom right corner of the screen on every page where it makes sense to you.

GIF

This is a demo of the ECSB plugin for WordPress that illustrates an example. When your website visitor hovers over the main button, there’s a few other buttons popping up letting them select their preferred way to contact your company. They can click on “Phone”, “Skype”, “Viber” or “WhatsApp” to start a call immediately. As to the call to action “Call Me”, it should always be visible, not only shown on hover as you see on the GIF.

Recommended tools:

86. Add a Price Estimate Form to Your Site

Use this type of smart interactive web forms to let your website visitors navigate to the right solution quickly without the hassle of digging through your overwhelming, complicated, confusing, tedious sales texts and videos. Price estimate forms allow you to eliminate all distractions on their way to the purchase as it makes other irrelevant options and prices invisible, they only see what they chose to see.

GIF

With this approach you’re clear and concise, brief but comprehensive about what you’re selling and how much it costs. The GIF above is a very short demo of the Cost Estimation & Payment Form Builder plugin for WordPress that perfectly illustrates the idea.

A great scenario of capturing leads with this form is, for example, offering a discount on the final step in exchange for your prospect’s email address: final cost is $1,000, sign up for 10% off.

87. Add a Chat Box to Your Site

Recommended tools:

88. Facebook Push Notifications

Capture leads who you’ll be able to reach through Facebook notifications with your marketing messages. Don’t let your business depend entirely on your email delivery and open rates. You can broadcast personalized messages with clickable links directly to Facebook accounts of your potential customers that will appear in their notification tray:

Notifly WordPress plugin allows you to run push notification campaigns right from your WordPress dasboard.

Push notifications can only be delivered to those people who have signed up to your email list by clicking on a Notifly button or link on your website. If they’re logged in to Facebook, they’ll be subscribed in a click. If not, they will see this pop up window requiring them to enter their Facebook login details.

Once they sign up, the email addresses they use to login to their Facebook profiles will be available to you too.

As to Notifly link, you can drop it in any appropriate place online to collect leads: on social media sites, in forum signatures, within your author bios on blogs where you submit guest posts, etc.

The use of the plugin doesn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service as Facebook allows game apps to send notifications to their audiences.

Benefits of using push notifications:

Increase conversions

Expand your marketing list

Get more data about your leads without having them type it all into a long subscription form (copied for you from their Facebook accounts automatically on sign-up)

93. Offer a Free Demo of Your Product or Service

94. Offer a Bonus to Your Product or Service

95. Offer a Discount to Your Product or Service

96. Leverage the Power of Scarcity

97. Leverage the Power of Social Proof

98. Create a Short Memorable Viral Ad

Although it’s conventionally considered to be a B2C thing, business owners are human beings too. Film a creative commercial that manipulates people’s emotions and haunts their minds.

It doesn’t have to cost you a fortune to get done. Figure it out and produce it with your team or find an affordable freelancer to make it for you. Your ad doesn’t have to be a long movie or something. Think 30 sec – 1 min.

101. Offer a Shippable Book/Magazine/Brochure

In this example you can see the free shippable paperback book Ask by Ryan Levesque

102. Ship out Physical Gifts to Purchase Directors

Instead of spamming decision makers with cold emails or calls, spam them with physical gifts:

103. Use Snail Mail Marketing

Get your website visitors to opt in to your mail list to receive a lead magnet delivered via snail mail as a paper brochure, post card, memory card, etc… You can also perform direct mail outreach offering companies a business partnership, pitching them a collaboration project, asking them for an interview, etc…

Using direct mailing as a form of unsolicited advertising is as disgusting as email spam. Reach out with some free value at least. Instead of pushing your product or service right off the bat, invite decision makers to attend your free online/offline event or shedule a free online/offline consulting/coaching session with you. Giving away free digital products/services via physical mail would be a good idea as well.

104. Try Newspaper Ads

105. Become a Guest Speaker at an Offline Event

Leverage your influential connections to get invited to speak at an offline event.

106. Network at Offline Events

Attend relevant offline events in your industry to get access to the audience that fits your business. Grab the opportunity to meet and network with decision makers who will be interested in your products and services.

107. Get Your Offline Event Sponsored

Small in-person events is still the most powerful but very expensive lead generation strategy for B2B companies. If your budget is too tight to hold one of your own, you can still partner up with another company (or multiple companies) that targets the same audience but is not your direct competitor to split the cost.

Another option is finding sponsors who will fund your event if you’re will promote their brands. It’s fine as your speaker will be there to promote your brand as well. Make sure you’re not in direct competition with your sponsors.

The third option is finding people who are willing to invest in your event just to get a profit so you don’t have to promote other brands and focus it entirely on your business instead but it’s risky because you need to generate enough event revenue to pay back your investors.

108. Tradeshows & Exhibitions

109. 1 on 1 Meetings Offline

110. Pitch Your Content to Small Local Radio Stations

Build and leverage influential connections to get featured on a small local radio station. Pitch your content to a relevant radio show, land an interview and get on the radio to provide some extraordinary value as an expert in your field to their listenership.

Recommended tools:

111. Pitch Your Content to Small Local TV Stations

Build and leverage influential connections to get featured on a small local TV station. Pitch your content to a relevant TV show, land an interview and get on TV to provide some extraordinary value as an expert in your field to their viewership.

Self-employed lead generation manager, virtual assistant from Kyiv, Ukraine helping B2B startups improve and implement their lead generation strategies and tactics increasing the quantity and quality of sales leads in their pipelines.

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2 Comments

This is like all in one package that has everything. I may have to try most of the tools listed in here and hoping I can remember most of the guide in here. My question is, what is the best SMS platform for marketers? I would like to see some reviews or suggestions. Because I want to prepare everything before I start my campaign.

I hope you found value in this guide.
One of my partners uses TextFleet for SMS marketing.
You can try it here for free http://textfleet.grsm.io/MaksymFrantsuzov.
Let me know if it has the features you’re looking for.
If not, I will look into alternatives.